Question of the Day

Did illegal voters swing any congressional races?

Horrifying Hillary

“Who is Hillary Rodham Clinton? She is not friends and detractors agree on this like you and me. In the present season, we have several biographies of the first lady to absorb. The latest of them is Gail Sheehy’s, called Hillary’s Choice.’ …“Her report is both horrifying and fascinating. This is the Hillary Clinton we think we know, or are afraid we know: manipulative, paranoid, ferocious, power-mad, self-pitying, vindictive, willful, ideological, undemocratic, dishonest chilling… .“Hillary Rodham, as the tale goes, was reared in white-bread, repressive Park Ridge, Ill., by unfeeling Republican parents… . When she arrived at Wellesley College in 1965, she discovered beauty and truth… . Later, while at Yale Law School, Hillary spent a summer working for Robert Treuhaft, the communist attorney and defender of the Black Panthers in Oakland, Calif… . The radicalism of her student days grew into the left-liberalism of Marian Wright Edelman’s Children’s Defense Fund, Norman Lear’s People for the American Way, and, of course, her pet, national health care.’“This is the Hillary Clinton of today, freed from Arkansas, freed from a largely centrist administration that acquiesced in Republican welfare reform, gunning for office in the more hospitable climes of New York.” Jay Nordlinger, writing on “Super Dem,” in the Dec. 20 issue of National Review.

Deliberately dumb

“Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt’s new book, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America,’ is without doubt one of the most important publishing events in the annals of American education in the last hundred years.“John Dewey’s School and Society,’ published in 1899, set American education on its course to socialism. Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read,’ published in 1955, informed American parents that there was something terribly wrong with the way the schools were teaching children to read ….“But Iserbyt has done what no one else wanted or could do. She has put together the most formidable and practical compilation of documentation describing the well-planned deliberate dumbing down’ of American children by their education system.” Samuel L. Blumenfeld, writing on “Deliberately dumbing us down,” Dec. 2 on World Net Daily (www.worldnetdaily.com)

Whiners, not winners

“God reveals himself in the fearful and wonderful make of his creatures, and in the gratuitous beauty of his world. For centuries, the self-evident design of things was regarded as an irrefutable argument for the existence of God.“In the current century, however … scientific orthodoxy has declared design to be an illusion… .“The 19th century atheist, Friedrich Nietzsche, saw more clearly when he said that there is no human remedy for the poverty of atheism. If we have killed God, Nietzsche says very reasonably, then we must become gods ourselves to be worthy of it… .“The common response of an atheistic age to the enduring problem of human misery is far less heroic than what Nietzsche called for. Without God, real people more frequently become whiners than winners. We hear everywhere from noisy groups of self-styled victims … seeking to achieve through clamor and malice the sort of affirmation that could only be won by industry and restraint.“These will never be Nietzschean supermen. Yet if they could but lift their eyes unto the hills around, we sometimes think, beauty itself might lead them out of the ugly little worlds they could inhabit.“But for now they are, in the words of St. Paul, without God in the cosmos.” Graeme Hunter, writing on “Atheism and Argument,” in the November/December issue of Touchstone